“Coming Back from the Dead” Is No Longer Science Fiction
Last year, there were widespread reports of a 53-year-old Frenchman who had suffered a cardiac arrest and "died," but was then resuscitated back to life 18 hours after his heart had stopped.
The once black-and-white line between life and death is now blurrier than ever.
This was thought to have been possible in part because his body had progressively cooled down naturally after his heart had stopped, through exposure to the outside cold. The medical team who revived him were reported as being "stupefied" that they had been able to bring him back to life, in particular since he had not even suffered brain damage.
Interestingly, this man represents one of a growing number of extraordinary cases in which people who would otherwise be declared dead have now been revived. It is a testament to the incredible impact of resuscitation science -- a science that is providing opportunities to literally reverse death, and in doing so, shedding light on the age-old question of what happens when we die.
Death: Past and Present
Throughout history, the boundary between life and death was marked by the moment a person's heart stopped, breathing ceased, and brain function shut down. A person became motionless, lifeless, and was deemed irreversibly dead. This is because once the heart stops beating, blood flow stops and oxygen is cut off from all the body's organs, including the brain. Consequently, within seconds, breathing stops and brain activity comes to a halt. Since the cessation of the heart literally occurs in a "moment," the philosophical notion of a specific point in time of "irreversible" death still pervades society today. The law, for example, relies on "time of death," which corresponds to when the heart stops beating.
The advent of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in the 1960s was revolutionary, demonstrating that the heart could potentially be restarted after it had stopped, and what had been a clear black-and-white line was shown to be potentially reversible in some people. What was once called death—the ultimate end point— was now widely called cardiac arrest, and became a starting point.
From then on, it was only if somebody had requested not to be resuscitated or when CPR was deemed to have failed that people would be declared dead by "cardiopulmonary criteria." Biologically, cardiac arrest and death by cardiopulmonary criteria are the same process, albeit marked at different points in time depending on when a declaration of death is made.
The apparent irreversibility of death as we know it may not necessarily reflect true irretrievable cellular damage inside the body.
Clearly, contrary to many people's perceptions, cardiac arrest is not a heart attack; it is the final step in death irrespective of cause, whether it be a stroke, a heart attack, a car accident, an overwhelming infection or cancer. This is how roughly 95 percent of the population are declared dead.
The only exception is the small proportion of people who may have suffered catastrophic brain injuries, but whose hearts can be artificially kept beating for a period of time on life-support machines. These people can be legally declared dead based on brain death criteria before their hearts have stopped. This is because the brain can die either from oxygen starvation after cardiac arrest or from massive trauma and internal bleeding. Either way, the brain dies hours or possibly longer after these injuries have taken place and not just minutes.
A Profound Realization
What has become increasingly clear is that the apparent irreversibility of death as we know it may not necessarily reflect true irretrievable cellular damage inside the body. This is consistent with a mounting understanding: it is only after a person actually dies that the cells in the body start to undergo their own process of death. Intriguingly, this process is something that can now be manipulated through medical intervention. Being cold is one of the factors that slows down the rate of cellular decay. The 53-year-old Frenchman's case and the other recent cases of resuscitation after prolonged periods of time illustrate this new understanding.
Last week's earth-shattering announcement by neuroscientist Dr. Nenad Sestan and his team out of Yale, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, provides further evidence that a time gap exists between actual death and cellular death in cadavers. In this seminal study, these researchers were able to restore partial function in pig brains four hours after their heads were severed from their bodies. These results follow from the pioneering work in 2001 of geneticist Fred Gage and colleagues from the Salk Institute, also published in Nature, which demonstrated the possibility of growing human brain cells in the laboratory by taking brain biopsies from cadavers in the mortuary up to 21 hours post-mortem.
The once black-and-white line between life and death is now blurrier than ever. Some people may argue this means these humans and pigs weren't truly "dead." However, that is like saying the people who were guillotined during the French Revolution were also not dead. Clearly, that is not the case. They were all dead. The problem is not death; it's our reliance on an outdated philosophical, rather than biological, notion of death.
Death can no longer be considered an absolute moment but rather a process that can be reversed even many hours after it has taken place.
But the distinction between irreversibility from a medical perspective and biological irreversibility may not matter much from a pragmatic perspective today. If medical interventions do not exist at any given time or place, then of course death cannot be reversed.
However, it is crucial to distinguish between biologically and medically: When "irreversible" loss of function arises due to inadequate treatment, then a person could be potentially brought back in the future when an alternative therapy becomes available, or even today if he or she dies in a location where novel treatments can slow down the rate of cell death. However, when true irreversible loss of function arises from a biological perspective, then no treatment will ever be able to reverse the process, whether today, tomorrow, or in a hundred years.
Probing the "Grey Zone"
Today, thanks to modern resuscitation science, death can no longer be considered an absolute moment but rather a process that can be reversed even many hours after it has taken place. How many hours? We don't really know.
One of the wider implications of our medical advances is that we can now study what happens to the human mind and consciousness after people enter the "grey zone," which marks the time after the heart stops, but before irreversible and irretrievable cell damage occurs, and people are then brought back to life. Millions have been successfully revived and many have reported experiencing a unique, universal, and transformative mental state.
Were they "dead"? Yes, according to all the criteria we have ever used. But they were able to be brought back before their "dead" bodies had reached the point of permanent, irreversible cellular damage. This reflects the period of death for all of us. So rather than a "near-death experience," I prefer a new terminology to describe these cases -- "an actual-death experience." These survivors' unique experiences are providing eyewitness testimonies of what we will all be likely to experience when we die.
Such an experience reportedly includes seeing a warm light, the presence of a compassionate perfect individual, deceased relatives, a review of their lives, a judgment of their actions and intentions as they pertain to their humanity, and in some cases a sensation of seeing doctors and nurses working to resuscitate them.
Are these experiences compatible with hallucinations or illusions? No -- in part, because these people have described real, verifiable events, which, by definition are not hallucinations, and in part, because their experiences are not compatible with confused and delirious memories that characterize oxygen deprivation.
The challenge for us scientifically is understanding how this is possible at a time when all our science tells us the brain shuts down.
For instance, it is hard to classify a structured meaningful review of one's life and one's humanity as hallucinatory or illusory. Instead, these experiences represent a new understanding of the overall human experience of death. As an intensive care unit physician for more than 10 years, I have seen numerous cases where these reports have been corroborated by my colleagues. In short, these survivors have been known to come back with reports of full consciousness, with lucid, well-structured thought processes and memory formation.
The challenge for us scientifically is understanding how this is possible at a time when all our science tells us the brain shuts down. The fact that these experiences occur is a paradox and suggests the undiscovered entity we call the "self," "consciousness," or "psyche" – the thing that makes us who we are - may not become annihilated at the point of so-called death.
At New York University, the State University of New York, and across 20 hospitals in the U.S. and Europe, we have brought together a new multi-disciplinary team of experts across many specialties, including neurology, cardiology, and intensive care. Together, we hope to improve cardiac arrest prevention and treatment, as well as to address the impact of new scientific discoveries on our understanding of what happens at death.
One of our first studies, Awareness during Resuscitation (AWARE), published in the medical journal Resuscitation in 2014, confirmed that some cardiac arrest patients report a perception of awareness without recall; others report detailed memories and experiences; and a few report full auditory and visual awareness and consciousness of their experience, from a time when brain function would be expected to have ceased.
While you probably have some opinion or belief about this based upon your own philosophical, religious, or cultural background, you may not realize that exploring what happens when we die is now a subject that science is beginning to investigate.
There is no question more intriguing to humankind. And for the first time in our history, we may finally uncover some real answers.
Goodnight, Moon. Goodnight, Sky Advertisement.
Imagine enjoying a romantic night stargazing, cozying up for the evening – and you catch a perfectly timed ad for Outback Steakhouse.
Countries have sovereignty over their airspace, but the night sky itself is pretty much an open field.
That's the vision of StartRocket, a Russian startup planning to put well-lit advertisements into outer space. According to a recent interview, StartRocket says its first client is PepsiCo.
The Lowdown
Launching at twilight during the early morning or early evening, the ads will be on cubesats – 10 cm square metallic boxes traditionally used in space. The attached Mylar sails will reflect light from the rising or setting sun, making the ad appear like an "orbital billboard."
The advertisements will need all the solar power they can get: According to a 2016 report, 80 percent of the world and 99 percent of America and Europe experience light pollution at night. Showing advertisements in, say, Wyoming will be much easier than attracting attention in Midtown Manhattan – and risks adding a considerable amount of light pollution to an already overburdened night sky.
Next Up
The StartRocket advertising program is set to begin in 2021. The most recent rate is $20,000 for eight hours of advertising space.
But first, StartRocket has to win over consumers, regulators and space activists.
"I don't see it taking off now," says TED Fellow and University of Texas, Austin Associate Professor Dr. Moriba Jah. Jah is the creator of Astriagraph, an interactive tool to help monitor space junk orbiting Earth. "In general, the space community is anathema to advertisements from orbit to people on the ground… The global astronomy community will be fighting it tooth and nail."
Jah notes SpaceX's launch of 60 satellites last month. "Astronomers were up in arms since they are so bright, you can see them with the naked eye." It got to the point where Elon Musk had to defend himself to the astronomy community on Twitter.
Open Questions
Startups come and go, especially those that are looking for funding. StartRocket is in both categories. Frankly, it's unclear if the ads will actually launch two years from now.
Space advertisements are more likely to be the future for less regulated and financially strapped areas.
The regulatory hurdles are just as unknown. According to Jah, countries have sovereignty over their airspace (think planes, balloons and drones), but the night sky itself is pretty much an open field. This doesn't remove the political ramifications, though, and any American-based launches would have to contend with the FCC, since it regulates advertisements, and the FAA, since it regulates flight.
Carbon credits-style redemptions may help balance out the potential environmental and political damage done by sky ads. It isn't a coincidence that space pioneers Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson succeeded at other ventures first, giving them considerably deep pockets to survive red tape – something StartRocket's team doesn't have at the moment.
Space advertisements are more likely to be the future for less regulated, financially strapped areas. Depending on how ad companies negotiate with the local governments, it's easy to picture Kolkata with an "Enjoy Coke" advertisement blaring during a Ganges sunset.
"In rural places, it would be like having another moon," Jah says. "People would say the rich are now taking the sky away from us."
Biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov is famous—and controversial--in the world of cutting-edge fertility treatments. A decade ago, he pioneered mitochondrial replacement therapy, paving the way for the world's first "three-parent" babies to be born free of a devastating inherited disease.
He sees his work toward embryo gene therapy as not only moral, but necessary.
In 2017, he shocked the world again when his group at Oregon Health and Science University became the first to repair a genetic mutation causing heart disease in dozens of human embryos. The embryos were later destroyed a part of the experiment; current policy in the U.S. prohibits such research from moving into clinical trials.
And that policy doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon, despite recent political wavering. Last month, a House subcommittee dropped the ban that has blocked the Food and Drug Administration since 2015 from considering any clinical trials of genetically altered embryos intended to create a baby. The move raised the hopes of supporters who want to see such research move forward and angered critics who feel that the science is getting ahead of the ethics. But yesterday, a House committee decided to restore the ban on gene-edited babies after all.
As for Mitalipov, he told leapsmag that he sees his work toward embryo gene therapy as not only moral, but necessary. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What motivates you to pursue this line of research, even though it is highly controversial?
It's my expertise, I'm an embryologist. We study early development in humans -- sperm, egg, and the first five days of development -- and try to use our knowledge to treat human diseases, particularly in that early stage. This is how IVF started, as a treatment for infertility. It's a very successful cell therapy treatment, with millions of children born. [Now the idea is] to actually to use this IVF platform not as much to treat infertility, but also to treat heritable genetic diseases, because this is a very important stage when gametes from either dad or mom will transmit mutations. This is the bottleneck where we could actually interfere and repair that mutation.
Many people are hesitant to support embryo editing because of "designer babies," yet polls do show that Americans are more open to embryo editing for the purpose of disease prevention. Where should society draw a line?
Yeah, I agree with most Americans that we don't have to edit -- meaning you could make all kind of changes. Instead we do gene repair, which is a therapeutic application.
Gene repair is quite different than gene editing. It involves [focusing on] already known disease-causing mutations and how we can turn them back to normal.
Thousands of gene mutations cause human diseases, like Crohn's, for example, or mutations causing cancer, heart disease. These are well-described, well-studied cause-and-effect diseases and we need to do something about it because otherwise it's impossible to treat once the mutation is already passed to a child.
Early intervention is the best in any disease, but in genetics, "early" means you have to do it at the time of fertilization. That's when we are dealing with one copy of the mutation or maybe two, versus when you have a whole body with billions of cells in solid tissues that we cannot really access and target. So this is the most efficient way of preventing thousands and thousands of genetic diseases. I understand that we have to make sure that it's very safe, of course, and efficient as well. But at the same time, I think this is the future. We have to work toward developing these technologies.
"If we continue banning the research everywhere and not funding it, maybe 100 years will not be enough."
What's your opinion of Dr. He Jiankui and the Chinese CRISPR'ed babies?
This is a case where he was doing gene editing, not gene repair. He hasn't corrected anything, he induced a mutation to normal human genes, hoping that this would somehow confer resistance to HIV, which is still unclear.
I think such straightforward editing is unacceptable specifically for human embryos. He's approach has also never been tested in an animal model. That's why the reaction from the public and scientists was very negative, because this is the case where the doctor does this without any expertise in this area, without knowing probably much about what he is doing, and he acquired it without any oversights, which is troubling. And of course, it negatively affects the legitimate research that is going on in some labs.
What might the future of embryo gene therapy look like?
Hopefully in 10 years from now, thousands and thousands of families that know they carry germline mutations…could go through IVF and we would correct it, and they could have healthy children.
Right now, we have some tools. We cannot correct, but we can select. So what happens is the parents become pregnant and then at about three months along, we can biopsy the amniotic fluid and say, "Hey unfortunately you passed on this mutation." And that means this child, if it's born, will be affected, so we give parents a choice of terminating the pregnancy.
Or we could do it much earlier, so parents go to the IVF clinic where we retrieve about ten eggs, after stimulating a woman's ovaries. Each of them will be fertilized so we have ten embryos that develop. We have a five-day window where we can keep them in the lab. And we basically reap a few cells, we do a biopsy from each of these ten, and we say, "Hey embryo number 1 and number 4 are not mutant, but the others are."
Then we can take these two and the other eight usually will be thrown away. That's the technology that we have now. Some ethicists argue on religious grounds that we have this selection technology available, so why do we need germline gene therapy [i.e. repairing the disease-causing mutations in an embryo]?
I don't understand the moral argument there, because all the available technology is based on selective destruction of the embryo.
With [IVF gene therapy], we will take ten embryos and every embryo we'll make healthy because we can get rid of the mutations. How could embryo destruction be morally superior?
How long do you think it will take for this technology to be available to prospective parents?
It depends how many legitimate labs with expertise can get into this field and resolve all the scientific questions. If we continue banning the research everywhere and not funding it, maybe 100 years will not be enough.
So far, I think that my lab is the only one legitimately working on it. But we would like five, 10, maybe 100 labs in this country and Europe really working. Because we have scientific challenges that we need to resolve before we could say, "Hey now we know how to correct [a given mutation] and now this could be efficient, and there are no side effects or very little." And then we could say, "Okay, I think we've done everything we could in petri dishes and in animals, and now we are ready to transplant this embryo in a patient and see what happens."
"There's just no way you could sink your head into the sand and say, 'Oh, we just ban it and then hopefully everything will go away.'"
Does banning emerging technology actually work?
Banning it usually means it will leak out to a gray area where there's no regulation and many private IVF clinics will just use it while it is still premature. So I think we have to regulate the clinical testing. There's just no way you could sink your head into the sand and say, "Oh, we just ban it and then hopefully everything will go away." That's not going to happen.
If this technology does become feasible and legal in the future, do you think that more and more couples will choose IVF and gene therapy versus the natural method of rolling the dice?
As sequencing technology is becoming available, like 23andMe, more and more parents will realize what kind of mutations they carry. And if your spouse carries the same mutation on the same locus, now you have very high chance of transmitting it. Most of the time today, we find out these families carry it once they have one or two children with that condition.
Of course, parents can just do it naturally in the bedroom and have a chance of transmitting or not transmitting mutations, but hopefully eventually we can say, "Hey, because of your condition, you don't want to play this Russian Roulette. Let's just do IVF." And hopefully the government will cover that kind of treatment because right now IVF is not covered in most states. And we do this therapy and then they have a healthy child.
We have 10,000 different mutations in the human population. That means probably billions of people carry mutations. And unless they go through this gene therapy through IVF, they will keep transmitting them. And we're going to keep having millions and millions of children with diseases. We have to do something about it.
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.